‘Multi-religious prayer almost inevitably leads to false interpretations, to indifference as to the content of what is believed or not believed, and thus to the dissolution of real faith.” So wrote Joseph Ratzinger in 1986. Even then, the man who would later become Pope Benedict XVI was renowned as a singularly deep thinker on the finer points of religious belief systems — to say nothing of the sweeping themes.

As head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, Cardinal Ratzinger was ruminating on the World Prayer Day for Peace, forged by his legendary papal predecessor, John Paul II. Though he was among the pontiff’s closest advisers, Ratzinger was uneasy about John Paul II’s grand gesture: taking center stage in a spectacle of interfaith solidarity. Flanked about him were leaders of the world’s religions. Even Shamanism took its place among Roman and Eastern Orthodox Catholicism, Protestant sects, Judaism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and, of course, Islam — all joined in an iconic, ecumenical quest for “peace.”

It was as if there were but one civilization, one single, common way of looking at the world. It was as if there were a talismanic aura about “peace,” such that the word connoted a universal value, impervious to inquiry about its meaning to the variegated voices uttering it. Was this “peace” the mere absence of war? Hadn’t the 20th century already proved that there were evils worse than war? Was “peace” an absence of war achieved by appeasing malevolent oppressors? Or was it an absence of such oppressors because they had been righteously defeated — because liberty and equal opportunity, undergirded by the rule of law, had triumphed? Details, details. Surely a tidal wave of banners, splaying “peace” in a Babel of tongues, would wash away such impertinent questions.

In a nod to the host locale of this iconic display, the event’s legacy came to be known as the “spirit of Assisi,” that city of deep spiritual redolence. Ah, but deep spiritual redolence . . . for whom? Assisi is a holy city if you are a Christian. To other religious traditions, it is just another dot on the map. To a fundamentalist Muslim, it would be better understood as a coveted city than a holy one. What makes it sacred in Roman Catholic lore, its witness to what the faithful take to be ultimate truth, would make it anything but a place of reverence in classical Islam.

Nevertheless, papering over these distinctions is our convention, is it not? And nowhere is that manifested more clearly than in the cloying homage paid by the West to things Islamic. The ostentation with which the U.S. armed forces revere the Koran — indeed, “the Holy Qur’an,” as our top commanders unfailingly refer to it — borders on parody: mandating, at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp for instance, that a copy of the book be distributed to each detained jihadist (notwithstanding that each construes it to command war — I suppose I should say, holy war — against the West), the said delivery carried out by a white-gloved military guard, who must, if at all feasible, be a Muslim.

Who cares what the Koran and the other sources of Islamic scripture — the hadith and the authoritative biographies of Islam’s warrior prophet — actually say? We are to regard them as “holy,” the same adjective our official lexicon ubiquitously attaches to cities like Mecca, Medina, and Qom — even as the word “Christmas” is purged as a modifier of “carol,” “card,” “tree,” “present,” “party,” and “celebration.” In the West we no longer acknowledge, much less celebrate, what distinguished us as the West.

Such distinctions, though, were the inspiration for Cardinal Ratzinger’s clarion note of caution against multi-religious prayer. Religion as cosmetic reverence shorn of substantive content is a virtue only the postmodern, post-doctrinal West could love: its self-congratulatory elites having evolved beyond anything so quaint as doctrine and arrived at . . . nihilism. Ratzinger knew better. Doctrinal differences never lose their salience because it is doctrine that defines a believer. To airbrush our differences — even for the well-intentioned purpose of elevating “peace” as a transcendent value — is to deny the essence of who we are.

Thus should multi-religious prayer be a rarity, Ratzinger admonished — “to make clear that there is no such thing . . . as a common concept of God or belief in God.” Far from religion, religious relativism — oblivious of doctrinal content, eroding real faith — is a destroyer of conviction. The philosopher cardinal grasped, moreover, that the obverse is true: Real faith has such transcendent power that religious relativism — this “common concept of God,” this nihilism swaddled in politically correct reverence — cannot compete. Read More